Elastic Behaviour of Open Sandwich Bridge Decks

The structural behaviour of multibay, open sandwich, reinforced concrete bridge decks is investigated, using the finite prism method. It is found that flat slab decks and inverted catenary slab decks exhibit satisfactory load distribution properties, but that their thin depth leads to unusually large in-plane shear distortion. Simpler methods of analysis are shown to be adequate for flat slabs, but not for inverted catenary slabs.
C.C.K. Wong and Professor A.E. Vardy